The council chamber stank of disinfectant, politics, and fear.
Mayor Hoshida sat dead center beneath a giant holo-banner that flickered FORWARD TOGETHER: NEW TOKYO 2090. The usual suspects were flanking him—Chief Admin Takeda from Tech Oversight, Director Liao from Neural Infrastructure, old man Kuwata from Budget Allocation, and half a dozen others with their faces buried in glowing tablets.
It felt like I was on trial, not at a tactical debrief.
“Detective Valence, we don’t negotiate with terrorists.”
“You saw the wall. You all saw what it wrote.”
Takeda tapped at her screen. “Yes, we’ve reviewed the visual transcript. However, interpretation is still pending.”
“It said my name. It said alone. That’s not a prank. That’s not random netjunk bullshit. That’s targeted.”
Kuwata scoffed. “So now we’re taking direct orders from blood scrawling wetware cables?”
“You know what I see? A dead police chief hanging from his own rafters with fiber optics threaded through his goddamn organs.”
“Watch your tone, detective,” said Liao without looking up.
“Why? So I don’t offend the men who let Watson get more fucked up than a salary man on payday?”
Mayor Hoshida finally spoke, calm and calculated. “Detective Valence. No one is denying the severity of the incident. But escalation without comprehensive review only feeds hysteria.”
“This isn’t hysteria. This is systemic. You seen what’s coming in from Chiba City? Three missing inspectors. Same goddamn tech signature.”
“We’re aware.”
“Nagasaki?”
“Seven bodies, same MO. Kyoto, last week—an entire bioforensics lab went dark and came back online talking to itself. You think this is isolated?”
“That information has not been verified,” said one of the assholes.
“Because you won’t let anyone verify it!” I slapped my file on the table. “We have coordinates. A message. And something that’s dragging bodies into the old net infrastructure like it’s making a fucking quilt.”
I was met with silence.
Then Hoshida folded his hands.
“Detective Valence, you’re currently operating under elevated stress levels, and your field report has not been approved through Internal Oversight.”
“You’re stalling.”
“We are following protocol.”
I laughed. “Right. Protocol.”
He leaned forward.
“Effective immediately, your access to investigative AI clusters and neural analysis suites is suspended. Your service badge is to be submitted for review, and your clearance levels will be reassessed.”
“You’re benching me?”
“No. You are being given the opportunity to rest. Recover. Your mental health profile shows significant instability—”
“I am not unstable. I’m angry. There’s a difference.”
“Detective Valence,” said Takeda, “you have ten seconds to comply with the reassignment procedure or we will be forced to initiate a formal suspension.”
I stared at them. All of them. Councilmembers hiding behind blinking reports. Policy rats twisting the narrative. Engineers who hadn’t seen sunlight in a decade telling me the sky wasn’t falling. The same system that let Watson hang like a marionette of copper and meat was telling me to sit down and shut up. I reached slowly into my coat and pulled out my badge.
Looked at it. Let it sit in my palm.
Then I threw it on the floor.
It clattered against the tile and spun.
“Go fuck yourselves.”
I walked out.
Rain pelted the glass walls of the city hall parking garage like acid marbles. My boots echoed on the concrete as I approached the Thunderbird III. The turbines were still warm. Like it knew we weren’t done yet. I opened the trunk. Pulled out the Marlin .30-30, extra bandolier, netscanner, backup navmap, peach footballs, burner pills, two protein bars, and a handwritten note I’d forgotten I still carried.
The one from the last good partner I’d lost—Watson.
Before he became chief and was bought out for a slice of the good life.
I read it: Sorry buddy, kid’s college fund, love ya. Don’t worry we’re going to clean up New Tokyo.
I stuffed it in my duster pocket and lit a Camel.
I was alone now. Just like it said.
“Still packing lever guns like a goddamn cowboy?” McSweeney’s voice rang out.
I didn’t turn.
“You here to turn me in?”
“Nope.”
I looked back. He stood there in civvies, a rain-drenched duffel over his shoulder and his M4 in one hand.
“They took your clearance too?”
“Didn’t wait for them to.” He held up a middle finger.
“I tendered my resignation on the way down.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Yeah, well. Nobody else is gonna watch your ass while you mouth off to murder cables.”
I nodded. Opened the gullwing door. “Let’s rock this bitch.”
“Won’t they have deactivated the car?”
“Yeah. Problem for them is that I switched the VINs long ago. This has been my personal ride for fucking years.”
“You son of a bitch!”
We jumped in and McSweeney pulled out an old cassette tape—Stained Class by Judas Priest. I took it and slammed it in the old deck.
He hit the button for side two, and the kick drum to the song Saints in Hell started right as I flipped the switch to spool up the J75s.
Chapter 10 – The City They Tried to Bury
“Think Mort will still answer our calls?”
“One way to find out.”
I rang him up.
No answer.
“Damn.”
We drove on easy on the skyway as the tape rolled on, when we got a call.
“What do you fuckers want.”
“Mort! You brilliant bastard, we’re going underground.”
“No shit, you think I can’t track your car?”
“Mort…”
“Rich. I don’t give a fuck, I didn’t get a bonus this year, I assume you want some scans. My Steam profile got banned recently for trolling, so I ain’t doing shit. Besides, no Looney Tunes reruns tonight.”
He sent us over gigabytes of data to the onboard terminal, including the best access points.
Several of the underground catacombs had been partially flooded throughout Oedo’s abandonment. In the 2030s the old city, for lack of space, was essentially shelled. New Tokyo was built on top and partially in the sky. Figured his data was the best to follow so we glided down into an old sewer ravine, tires hitting concrete, and I switched over to the ICE. The 460 growled as we bounced over debris and mud, fish tailing and spilling McSweeney’s open beer in his lap.
“Damnit!!”
After some time we entered a tunnel, and finally came up on a large steel circular vault door, with a side access fire door for the old security booth. Both were sealed tight.
We got out and I shouldered my Marlin.
McSweeney M4 in tow walked up and lit a cigarette.
“Well goddamnit hand, what now?”
The side access door opened.
I raised my rifle.
“Paranoid asshole, y’all got anymore beer?”
Mort.
Chapter 11 – Blood On the Track
We tucked into the steel door into Mort’s makeshift HQ on-site. Some CRT screens were lit and running programs. Mort sat down and cracked his knuckles. The green glow reflecting off his coke-bottle Hydro glasses.
“Council thinks they sealed this shit off for good, but where do you think I’ve gotten all my legacy shit.”
“Checks out.”
“Well yeah, until about six years ago. Most of us quit coming here once a few netrunners disappeared, we’re not the fighting type. Figured it was probably chem addicts or some shit, I was making enough money by then to quit having to salvage so…”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Alright well, it’s been a bit but there’s an old railcart that will take you to the citadel, hard to get a read but we’ll see how far it’ll take you.”
We passed through another set of double doors and loaded our shit on the cart.
I turned to Mort, “Hey so…”
“Shut up Rich.”
I wrapped my arms around him in a hug, “Thanks buddy.”
He didn’t know what to do, arms awkwardly at his sides.
“Uhhh, yeah, well you know…”
After passing through countless snaking wires and terminal boxes with lowlight we started reaching the bad part of the rails. The netscanner hadn’t stopped, and with the weather report we knew there was a good chance rails would not just be wet, but completely submerged. After a small de-rail I made some adjustments to the wheels. Finally, we had the cart again barreling to abandoned zone 4B. McSweeney piped up, “What was all that be well shit with Fukinara the other day?”
“Formality.”
“C’mon, with as much as we stop there, what’s the old man to you?”
“He raised me, bought me off the slave traders when I was 15.”
He lit another cigarette.
“Jesus.”
I didn’t reply but held out two fingers for a cigarette. After some rail riding and another blue pill to keep me awake, we glided through an archway and finally could see the long abandoned buildings. What was once an underground metropolis was now left to rot in its archaic infrastructure. We pulled up comms with Mort. When suddenly the cart power died.
“Shit. Looks like that’s it for powered rail.”
“Guess so.”
I hopped off and was able to grab my pack and Marlin. Then with McSweeney still on the cart unloading, the lights came back on, and it began to accelerate forwards full tilt.
“SHIT!!!”
A switch flipped on the track, tilting one of the rails up, the cart pulled a barrel roll, skidding off the tracks, supplies, comms, screams, and then McSweeney became a jumbled mess of man and wreckage.
I ran over.
But it was over.
I would never get that last beer he owed me.
I found the comm radio and frantically tried it, nothing. Static.
I felt the adrenaline coming back threefold.
Fuck.
It was quiet.
The kind of quiet that you could never find in a New Tokyo street. The feeling when on a raid that someone was behind you—but you couldn’t prove it.
I kneeled by McSweeney and closed his eyelids, blood matting my hand. Then scrambled for my pills. Alprazolam.
They didn’t mention what could be controlled in this labyrinth. An oversight of the budget I’m sure. Blood and sake began to pool and then drip onto the rails, boiling from the electricity with blue sparks arching. I was now alone with only provisions for a day, my standard netscanner, .44 mag, and the Marlin. Behind me the flood gate over the archway dropped. A steel door four feet thick slammed, stirring up dust and shaking concrete blocks off nearby buildings, then the ancient glow lights above faded out, leaving me in complete darkness. Above me I heard groans. Deep metallic grinding as if some god had been disturbed.
I switched my retina implants to night vision and ran as fast as possible. My boots echoing off the cathedral dome, weaving between shops, abandoned cars and buses. I happened to see a dimly flickering sign with red wings. Finally, something somewhat alive.
